King James Bio

He wrote extensively including Basilicon Doron (the Kingly Gift), Daemonologie, and tracts on varied subjects such as "Counterblaste to Tobacco" which condemned the use of tobacco.

Held the Roman Catholic religion in contempt. Roman clerics tried to kill him more than once. In 1536, popery burned William Tyndale to death for distributing the Bible and it was MUCH displeased with King James' authorization of a Bible in English. Roman Catholic Nicolo Molin, an Ambassador said this of King James:

"...He is a Protestant...The king tries to extend his Protestant religion to the whole island. The King is a bitter enemy of our religion (Roman Catholic)...He frequently speaks of it in terms of contempt. He is all the harsher because of this last conspiracy (Gun Powder Plot) against his life...He understood that the Jesuits had a hand in it."

King James said this in Basilicon Doron:

"I am no papist (doesn’t adhere to the Roman Catholic Faith) as I said before...Now faith...is the free gift of God (as Paul sayeth). It must be nourished by prayer, which is no thing else but a friendly talking to God. Use oft to pray when ye are quiet, especially in your bed..."

He led a chaste life. Sir Henry Wotton (June 1602) said this of King James:

"There appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty...He wears short hair...among his good qualities none shines more brightly than the chasteness of his life, which he has preserved without stain down to the present time. Contrary to the example of almost all his ancestors, who disturbed the kingdom with the great number of bastards which they left."

In 1603, Sir Roger Wilbaham wrote:

"The King is of sharpest wit and invention...of the sweetest most pleasant and best nature that I ever knew, desiring nor affecting anything but true honor."

King James loved literature and wrote extensively including the Basilicon Doron which contains instructions to his son on how to live and be a just king. King James' advice to his son concerning chastity:

"Keep your body clean and unpolluted while you give it to your wife whom to only it belongs for how can you justly crave to be joined with a Virgin if your body be polluted? Why should the one half be clean, and other defiled? And suppose I know, fornication is thought but a veniall (forgivable) sin by the most part of the world, yet remember well what I said to you in my first book regarding conscience, and count every sin an breach of God's law, not according as the vain world esteems of it, but as God judge and maker of the law accounts of the same: hear God commanding by the mouth of Paul to abstain from fornication, declaring that the fornicator shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven, and by the mouth of John reckoning out fornication among other grievous sins that declares the commiters among dogs and swine."

Here is King James' comment on Christian conduct: "Holiness [is] the first and most requisite (indispensable) quality of a Christian (as proceeding from true fear and knowledge of God)."